Eyeballs
by ElapsingSpiral
Summary: Two years later and his head’s cracked in two. He sits in a lonely, unfamiliar flat in Stoke-on-Trent and he runs over the lyrics to those songs he used to listen to with Mike and they make total sense." - a story about eyeballs. Trust me on this. M/2ish


**Eyeballs**

It's 1996 and Mike puts the CD in the player then sits back on the sofa beside him, fag in his mouth, sweating beercan in hand. He gestures with the beer can hand as the song starts up, slide guitar and the sound of drunken Southern American states swaying in the background.

"You'd know you've fucking lost your marbles and broken your 'ead," the man says with total assurance, "When Beck's lyrics start to make sense."

They share a laugh, a swig of beer and let the sound drift over them.

Two years later and his head's cracked in two. He sits in a lonely, unfamiliar flat in Stoke-on-Trent and he runs over the lyrics to those songs he used to listen to with Mike and they make total sense.

**1**

Their first gig and all he can do is smell the sweat on the stage and in the air from where all those people before them cooked under the lights and were cheered on or laughed at or yawned offstage. He doesn't remember the lights in clubs being this bright as he danced and got off with girls in Crawley, or the lights at school being this bright in school plays. He doesn't remember a lot these days.

He squints to begin with, until the mass becomes a crowd and the crowd becomes people. Looking down he makes out the faces of a few girls his own age and gives a relieved smile that that must mean they're all people, not zombies or just his imagination. His eyes widen and his eyebrows shoot up in relief.

Through the smoke and the heat he sees two of them stare at his eyes momentarily. They must reflect the stage lighting, look plastic and shiny and vacant. The girls look sickly under their make-up and then look away. He squints once more and remembers days spent in dodgems and on ferris wheels, laughing and drunk and in charge. He glances back over his shoulder and sends the rest of the band a nervous but an eager look.

"On free is it?" he asks.

Russell pounds the bass drum in reply and with each thud the girls' looks fall away from his mind and he grabs the microphone like that's what he was made to do.

**2**

"I love you," he murmurs to her and he senses it's for the last time right as the words leave his mouth. He feels them like an ugly oil spill, flowing desperately out of him. Her thin lipped smile is the equivalent of her side stepping the sentiment altogether.

"Stuart, you're so sweet you know."

He focuses his whole attention on her, follows the flickering emotions on her face with his own, a cracked mirror reflecting her but her eye doesn't meet his. Her hand in his own large hand, the calloused fingertips of her hands stroking gently against the soft flesh at the bottom of his fingers and his thumb tripping over the cold bump of her knuckles.

"You never look at me these days," he says. His medicine, as it always does, is wearing off again. The words in his head slide off about the edges and he gathers them together as best he can, makes desperate sentences that he rattles off, fast and oddly high pitched in his determination. He sounds less and less smooth. He sounds more and more a marked contrast to men with growling voices and clever comments and cruel laughs. He knows she hates him now.

"You never look at me properly these days. You used to say I was a bit of a pretty boy. I'll get ma teef fixed if you want. It just don't affect my singin' so I never fink about it. I'm sorry Paula."

Her hand and her delicate little fingers, made for piano not guitar, tense up in his own a fraction and then she lets go. She studies his eyes at long last, perhaps for the first time (that he can remember since the accident) and definitely for the last. He watches how she takes in the blood and the swirling grey and the cloudiness and how it all throws a cloak over what he really feels, how he still feels, behind his shattered eyes and his broken little brain.

"I do," she says softly, "I look at you."

And then you look at him instead, he thinks.

**3**

"So, can you explain to me the inspiration behind the album? The title perhaps? "Demon Days". It sounds very foreboding."

The man addresses the question to him for a change, perhaps because Murdoc has started subtly playing with a cigarette and giving yearning stares to the door as he taps the filter against his lip. Interviewer wants something short and sweet from the singer for a change.

He considers the question, hearing how the bassist sighs in an unnecessarily melodramatic way. Words don't come easily because the meds are wearing off again and he's just left with emotions and urges: he wants to shake the smarmy smile off the interviewer's face, he wants to go to sleep, he wants to get a sandwich from the deli across the street and more than anything he wants to punch Murdoc in his self-satisfied face but someone beat him to it several decades before.

"Um," he says. Murdoc rolls his eyes.

So he steps outside his own body as he continues thinking of words and an order for those words. He considers how he looks. Gangly. Unshaven. Stupid t-shirt he found in Japan. Pretty young. Pretty pretty. Broken head. It occurs to him for what can't be the first time that he's perfect. He's absolutely perfect and Murdoc can sigh all he wants to but that won't stop him being as perfect as he is. He almost watches himself sat there, pretty, vacant. Music hasn't had a better frontman. Crafted for the pissing role.

So he finds the words.

"The title?" he says and lets the interviewer nod him on, "Just sounds good, dunnit?"

**4**

The smell is enough to turn his stomach but he's never actually sick. It's just a lingering feeling, like when he was younger and he used to take his meds and they messed with his stomach but never enough to truly make him ill. Every morning he wakes up, looks outside at the filth and the decay and his stomach churns but as soon as he makes to gag, nothing more happens. Seagulls wheel overhead, screaming at him, rapping his head open with their whining and their insistent demands.

He strides through his palace of decay, the shrine Murdoc's made for him and he finds the man himself sat in the rotting remains of what looks like some sort of CEO's chair, the leather near enough eaten away, foam spewing out of every nook. The bassist sits hunched up in it, spinning a little from side to side, catching himself on his Cuban heels before he turns too far either way. His eyes are trained on the window but when he enters, the bassist looks up at him instead. He looks-

Stuart tries to think of the right word.

His meds are wearing off and he can only smell outside and think about what it could be that seagulls eat without feeling as ill as he feels just smelling that stuff. He thinks.

Murdoc looks sheepish, tired, upset. He looks like an old man alone. Old man and the sea, Stuart thinks, he's seen that book lying around but the pages are crinkled and the ink has washed away to leave a nice little grey paper notebook behind. The sea has recycled for them.

Stuart considers the window that the bassist had been eyeing. Rather than the lone helicopter, lazing behind a cloud in the distance, he sees his own reflection and attempts to meet its eyes. His eyes are grey, lacklustre, cloudy. They are foggy, smoggy and smutty. They are factories far away and he closes them as he turns back to Murdoc. They flicker open again at the sound of the older man clearing his throat although with no intention of speaking.

Nothing much happens for a while but Stuart makes sure to keep his attention focused on just looking at Murdoc and the bags under his eyes and the madness in his gaze and his general air of having lost the plot. Looking like a man who understands Beck's lyrics too.

But Stuart is still the first to speak up. He collects together the words, like when he doesn't feel so sickened by the smell and goes scavenging on the beach outside. He picks out words which will do alright.

"You look right into my eyes," he says and the bassist returns the look tiredly.

"Yeah I do," the man agrees and the suggestion hangs in the air between them momentarily before he softly adds, "S'my fault after all. I made you like this."

He is surprised that doesn't need to consider that vague comment. His answer rolls off his tongue.

"Like Frankenstein, you mean?"

"No, just monster."

"What?"

"The man's Frankenstein, the monster didn't have a name," Murdoc says almost absently, "Didn't need one. It was just a mirror of himself, all the horror and the bad stuff inside himself for all the world to see."

Stuart pulls up an old bar stool smelling of sea salt and rum and perches atop it at the bassist' side. He lets his head loll until all the pieces of his poor little mind seem to slot a bit better together, collecting together in the centre in a heap like that.

"Ah well," he says, peering out from under his fringe and watching the helicopter dip a wing at them in a greeting, "Least the monster got the girl. Least monster got to 'ave a bit of fun, eh? I suppose he owed Frankenstein for that."

Murdoc lets out a sound like an electric shredder breaking, ready to be thrown away to join their little island of debris. It's a chuntering, choking bark of laughter. They don't laugh much here.

"Maybe. Maybe Frankenstein just got unbelievably lucky in his choice of monster," he murmurs and looks to Stuart once more. Stuart's little broken brain doesn't need to be told that the expression the man is wearing is one of bafflement. He doesn't need telling it's one of love.

"Maybe."


End file.
